US Death Row Inmate Survives Execution Attempt After Two Lethal Doses

Christa Pike, a 50-year-old US death row inmate, remained alive after Tennessee officials administered two doses of a lethal drug during an attempted execution on Wednesday.

Pike was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.

However, media witnesses said Pike was still awake and snoring more than 40 minutes after the second dose of pentobarbital was administered, according to the Associated Press.

The Tennessee Department of Correction had not immediately explained why the execution failed, while Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency motion seeking to halt the procedure.

The development followed a legal battle over whether the execution should proceed.

The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit had temporarily halted the execution shortly before it was scheduled to begin, after Pike’s lawyers argued that evidence of her childhood sexual abuse, neglect and other background factors had not been properly considered during her sentencing.

The US Supreme Court later overturned the stay, allowing Tennessee officials to proceed with the execution.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the decision.

Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, 17, killed Slemmer, whom they knew from the Knoxville Job Corps training centre.

Prosecutors said Pike accused Slemmer of trying to take her boyfriend before the pair attacked her.

Slemmer was beaten and stabbed, while a pentagram was carved into her body. The case attracted widespread attention in Knoxville and became associated with the so-called “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.

Pike was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to death.

Shipp, who was 17 when the crime occurred, was sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole.

Pike’s lawyers have argued that her age, history of severe childhood abuse and neglect, and mental health history should have been taken into account when she was sentenced to death.

They previously said Pike suffered sexual abuse as a child and that important evidence about her background was not adequately presented to the jury.

Her clemency request was rejected by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, who said he had reviewed the case but would not intervene.

If completed, the execution would have made Pike the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years.

Executions of women remain rare in the United States. Figures cited by the Associated Press show that 18 women have been executed in the country since capital punishment resumed in 1976, compared with more than 1,600 men.

As of Thursday morning, Tennessee authorities had yet to provide a detailed explanation for why the execution attempt failed, while Pike’s lawyers continued seeking emergency court intervention.

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